The ship is a world in itself: It's as tall as an eighteen-story building (fifteen stories of that above the waterline) and weighs 154,000 tons. The future-Nordic architecture (lots of wood, lots of modernist art, some surprisingly good) is like some floating Fritz Lang film: You can start at the top and tour the chapel where you can talk to God, the pilot house where the captain steers the ship, walk down to the state-of-the-art gym, the rock-climbing wall, the artificial wave pool for surfing, the deck of pools (including cantilevered hot tubs); take a glass elevator through the bowels of the ship down to the ice rink and casino; and then go into the "no access area" and take a staircases down beneath the waterline to where the workers live.

As much as the ship personifies excess afloat, it's is even more fascinating if you see analyze it as a system: You put in fossil fuels and enormous amounts of food-and what comes out is a lot of shit and a shitload of profit.

The Liberty (and the cruise industry in general) mirrors the world economy to an uncanny degree. The First World is represented by the vacationers themselves. They've got all sorts-retirees, fat bourgeois families with annoying kids in tow, attractive young couples. They're of all colors and from all nations; if you have the money, you're welcome to come aboard. This is because the system of this self-contained world is set up to do two things: To squeeze as much money out of the passengers as possible and to stuff them as full of calories as cattle at a feedlot. You can literally eat 24 hours a day, seven days a week in everywhere from the ongoing buffet to the three massive dining rooms. None of the food is particularly good-in true McWorld style, there's nothing that hasn't been bought in bulk and canned, preserved, or frozen-but there sure is a lot of it.

The shipboard economy is based on a magnetic swipecard that does the job of a room key, ID card, and wallet. It's linked to a credit card (in fact you have to settle your bill in cash or plastic or they won't let you off the ship) and can be used everywhere from the bars, the onboard shopping mall, the art auctions, and the restaurants. Even with the constant all-you-can-eat buffet, there's a plethora of places to buy food: a Ben and Jerry's, a pizza place, and, of course, about a dozen bars. And, of course, if you have too much money, there's the casino-there was a sign saying they paid out something like two million dollars over the course of the voyage, so you can imagine the amount of cash 4,000 passengers pumped into it.

The Third World exists only to serve the First, and the pecking order of the employees mirrored. Black people from the Caribbean were on the bottom, literally, taking care of cabins and making drinks. Waiters were brown from South America and South Asia and Southeast Asia. Your job status, and presumably pay, directly correlated to how well you speak English. At the bottom were the servants, who work for the (mandatory) tips. At the top of the hierarchy were the white people of northern European ancestry, from the captain (Norwegian) to the multinational cast of the shows, whose most onerous task was having to dance and celebrate at pre-scheduled times and generally maintain the scary Stepford-wife persona of a Human Resources employee.

Don't get me wrong: No one looked like they were being exploited. Everyone serves six-month contracts with two months off. Royal Caribbean goes to great lengths (especially after the $27 million judgment against them in for polluting in the late '90s) and seems like a lovely company to work for-if you don't mind your workplace being your home and prison and having to fit into a happy smiley world of customer service 24-7. Most of the workers are friendly and eager to talk to you-especially about how much they miss their families and how working on a cruise ships was really their best job option.

The ports of call mirror this world of joyful consumerism. The shore excursions planned for San Juan and St. Martin are banal in the extreme, mainly centered around shopping or siphoning money into other companies partnered with Royal Caribbean. (I, of course, am perfectly capable of walking around the former, and finding the nude beaches in the latter, on my own.) The big difference was the day spent at Royal Caribbean's private resort of Labadee, Haiti, which the crew, captain, and promotional literature are careful to refer to as being simply "on the island of Hispanola." This is more than just semantics: You get to drink tropical drinks, snorkel, and sunbathe on a completely Royal Caribbean-controlled resort on a peninsula leased from the Haitian government, protected by a security fence, and never know that you're actually in the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. The natives are reduced to a token presence of drummers, drinks servers, security guards, and bric-a-brac vendors.

But the thing is, as horrifyingly Baudrillardian as that sounds, it's not. You see, this wasn't my first cruise-I had been to Labadee on another cruise (also not one I'd paid for) ten years earlier. The previous time, I had taken a jet-ski tour around the area and been horrified by what I had seen-skeletal men in rags paddling boats in fished-out waters, accompanied by naked kids suffering from kwashiorkor. This time, I took another tour and saw a village that actually had electricity and cell phone service. Royal Caribbean employs more people than they have to, and that, together with direct aid and allowing people to sell their trinkets and beads, has made a world of difference.

I really want to condemn the cruise industry. However, in the end, this sort of global capitalism does wind up making the people of the third world happier, healthier, and more prosperous. It's just not the sort of happiness that we spoiled intellectual children of the First World would go for.